Is Food Porn Becoming Everybody’s Not-So-Secret Guilty Pleasure?

Because food can be sexy too.

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t’s the type of thing that, ten or twenty years ago, you would hide from your friends. You would tell your psychiatrist in guilty conscience that you spend your free time gazing longingly at sensuous photos of chocolate cake dripping with fudgy icing. But the 21st century is a wonderfully progressive place where, thanks to social media, it’s become normal for us to publicly moan over food and even openly compare it to porn.

Admit it, everybody’s guilty of indulging themselves every once in a while. Food porn is magnetic, it’s satisfying, and it makes a noticeable difference in the way we perceive our meal. According to a study published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing, taking a photo of our food makes it taste even better. Spending time with our food before we eat it – including fussing over its artistic composition and snapping a quick photo – builds the anticipation of getting to taste it.

Photo courtesy of ardentious on reddit.com

Because of different social media outlets like Instagram, food photography has become a part of the way we eat as well as an effective platform for advertisement. The programming VP for the Food Network once said in an interview with Harper’s Magazine: “We create this sensual, lush world, begging you to be drawn into it. It’s a beautifully idealized world.” He’s got a point. Without the help of strategic filters and lighting, asparagus is limp and Nutella becomes nothing but brown goop; food is pretty unsexy.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Scrivani on andrewscrivani.com

Andrew Scrivani, a food photographer, reveals the secret behind food porn in a video for the New York Times, explaining that it all has to do with tapping into your own and others’ love of eating. If you can find a way to convey the universal desirability of food, you’ll produce photos good enough to make everyone’s faces flush. Visual cues of food porn are so strong that they can even do what some thought was impossible: trick us into thinking healthy foods are delicious. I’ve fallen victim to it myself: buying and roasting a pile of brussel sprouts that tasted just as bitter as usual, all because I saw those photos on Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Scrivani on andrewscrivani.com

By sexing up our dishes to make veggies seem more vibrant or hot food look even steamier, we act exactly like porn directors. We create a hyperreal version of an otherwise ordinary experience. Food, like sex, is one of our most primal cravings, but the food in photos online gives us a desire that we’ll never be able to satisfy because food that good doesn’t actually exist. Basically we’re all a bunch of suckers, but who’s complaining?